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Excavation for Ground Zero Office Towers Is Finished

By Charles V. Bagli August 24, 2009 4:35 pmAugust 24, 2009 4:35 pm

The Port Authority has finally completed the excavation at ground zero for three office towers, after 14 months of delays and $130 million in penalties.The authority officially turned over the last of the three sites Monday to the developer Larry A. Silverstein, saying that Mr. Silverstein now had until 2014 to build the towers.

Under a 2006 development agreement, the authority was to have finished the excavation work in June 2008. But only one of the sites was finished in time. As a result, the authority had to pay a penalty of $300,000 a day until it finished the work. The penalty actually served as an abatement against Mr. Silverstein’s rent.

In keeping with the tone of the conflict between the two sides, Janno Lieber, who oversees the trade center project for Mr. Silverstein, issued a statement saying, “The same Port Authority bureaucracy that turned over this straightforward one-to-two-year effort to dig a hole into a three-and-a-half-year ordeal must do better.” He called on the authority to honor its commitment to build the transit hub, streets, sidewalks and vehicle security center at ground zero.

Contrary to Mr. Silverstein’s claims, Christopher O. Ward, the authority’s executive director, has insisted that those projects are on time and on budget.

But while Monday’s handover brings to an end one aspect of the long-troubled rebuilding effort, it does not resolve the standstill between the authority and Mr. Silverstein, who is to build the three skyscrapers with a total of 7.6 million square feet of space. Mr. Silverstein has demanded arbitration proceedings to resolve a second long-running dispute — this one threatens to delay other projects at the 16-acre site, in particular the opening of the memorial on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack. A steel beam that was the last removed in 2002 after the tower’s collapse was returned on Monday to the site, where it will become part of the memorial.

Mr. Silverstein is demanding that the authority guarantee the financing for his three towers, because he has been unable to get private financing or tenants. The authority, in turn, has been unenthusiastic about subsidizing speculative office towers, especially when its own revenue is declining sharply.

In recent weeks, Mr. Silverstein, as well as his supporters, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, have tried to turn the public debate from one about speculative real estate to one about the authority’s moral obligation to finish rebuilding the trade center site quickly.

In the past, Mayor Bloomberg had warned against building an immense amount of office space at ground zero all at once. But recently, he abandoned his longstanding criticism of Mr. Silverstein.

Other than an exclusive shopping mall, no sane builder is willing to invest in the PA buildings. There is a good chance the waterfalls will be ready to operate for a day on the 10th anniversary, but after that this impractical site plan will devolve into a fiasco.

If Silverstein was rebuilding the Twin Towers from the start, he would be getting numerous tenants off the phones and via email. He never did have the money to build the other buildings of the official plan, and asking for Ward of the PANYNJ to help him is only going to make less go there. Even Trump thinks that nothing should be built if there is no tenants otherwise he is just building empty shells. Let’s not forget that Silver believed that without the money needed, they would sit half built for a time. A new report from the LMCCC already states that many parts are already over budget and would most likely take even longer to complete, making it even more of a humilation.

It’s not fitting to build office towers at ground zero. So many lost their lives there, it would be more appropriate to protect and preserve the site as is, with a memorial to the souls who perished. I don’t think any prospective tenant would truly be comfortable in a high-rise on these hallowed grounds. Reconstruction should be out of the question.

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